Do like the Spanish do

When Eric and I first moved into our apartment we didn't notice anything wrong. A few weeks into living there we realized there was a funky smell coming from our second bathroom, "the older one". It turns out that the pipes were really old which prevented the sewage from properly flowing out of the bathroom. Granted we never used the bathroom so you can only imagine how long that stuff must have been stuck in there, and therefore how bad the smell was. Nonetheless, since we signed the lease under false pretenses we decided it was only fair that the owner fix this unlivable issue.

The owner said that she would have the bathroom redone. We were very excited. Now we were really getting some bang for our weakly converted buck. Their timeline of completion of the bathroom seemed the same as ours, fix this problem as soon as possible. Problem solved, right?

No, problem not solved. This is the part where I remind you of the country in which I live. I live in Spain, not Germany or Switzerland, countries of great efficiency. I live in southern Spain, where "no pasa nada" (no worries) and "tranquilo" (calm) are the mottos.

After three months of dealing with "late plumbers", the worthless brother of our landlord (our landlord lives in Madrid so we deal with her brother), being waken up before we had to be up, having our privacy interrupted, rigorously translating our concerns and issues into Spanish, AND after a 10 day trip to Rockville and back, the bathroom was, how do you say "complete?"...not quite.

This is what the we found when we returned to our apartment (believe me, we joked about the bathroom not being complete). There was a chair in the middle of the bathroom with a light fixture on it, not in ceiling. There was no door or curtain on the shower and there was a small water leak from the ceiling window. We had given them plenty of time to finish, had given them plenty of patience, but the bathroom was still just hairs away from being complete, it was not complete.

The real cherry on top of this whole catastrophe is that when our landlord's brother, Pepe, came by to talk to us about the "completed" bathroom and we told him that we still can't use the shower because there is no curtain, etc, his response was, in Spanish of course, "you can still use the shower, and I want to make sure it works, you can just mop up the floor after your showers". And to this Eric replied, in very good Spanish, "Why would I want to have to mop after I shower, just finish the bathroom". I mean really, mop after I shower? Who does that?

To them apparently almost complete is complete. No pasa nada, right?